: I was nonplussed (yes, it’s possible) when I listened to this week’s On The Media and heard a parody of cable networks devoting themselves to missing white women. In a bit borrowed from thePoorMan.net, they create a new network called Where the White Women At. Now that would have been funny after the attack of bridevision but right now when the missing white woman of the week is a teenager presumed murdered on an island… well, this was in uncharacterically bad taste, I’d say.

It’s satire, so it’s supposed to be topical. The joke is not on the girl nor her family but on the retarded producers of cable news that devote 20% of their time to this story.

http://blogebrity.com Nick

Yeah, at any given time a good-looking white female is missing. They can’t just wait until no one realizes that.
And “nonplussed” means confused, perplexed.

http://www.edcone.com Ed Cone

Given the saturation coverage of this poor kid in Aruba, the spot was more on the mark than ever.

http://www.thedailyalmanac.com dave Metzger

I’m sorry but at the same time that the cable stations were dedicating hours per day to the missing woman in Aruba 3 black boys between the age of 7-11 were missing in Camden NJ. Aside from local coverage, There was little or no national coverage. What if those three boys had been white?
Imagine if they had been little girls. The city would have been inundated with satellite trucks.
In the end it ended in tragedy with the three boys discovered in the trunk of a car very near to where they had disappeared. The cops never bothered to check the trunk.
Three little boys dead and a police force that some are now calling incompetent. Two stories which are basically going ignored with litte more then a whimper.
Bring on those satires. The more the better

http://www.deathandtaxesblog.com Joel S.

If we consider news coverage to be a sign of importance, then the implication is that the life of some white girl who disappeared in Aruba is, what, 100 or 1,000 or 100,000 or 1 million million times more important than the life of every black kid who has been killed in Chicago this year. THAT is what strikes me as being in bad taste.

http://www.mightymiddle.com michael reynolds

I agree with the above posts. It’s hard to see how a satire can be offensive when the reality is this endless leering, faux-tragic obsession with missing white babes and utter indifference to any such case not involving a bedable white woman between 18 and 34 years of age.

http://www.elflife.com/ carsonfire

Speaking of other lost children, I was actually outraged by a CBS story the other night which “reported” that the general news-watching audience is basically racist, since we are only interested in stories about lost, pretty white girls. This is probably one of the most breathtaking exercises in pure hypocrisy I’ve ever seen; not merely hypocritical, but produced hypocrisy with film and a narrative.
Seeming completely oblivious to the fact that it is their own prerogative which stories to run, they allowed a black woman a few seconds near the end of the story to plead the case for her missing girl (most of the story continued recounting the story about the girl lost in Aruba!) The few seconds allowed were compelling and heart-wrenching, and would move almost any viewer, yet CBS did not air enough of her story to be helpful; they merely exploited her for that few seconds to create the impression that the failure of this woman to grab headlines is the fault of people who have *absolutely no control over those headlines*!
It is, in fact, the cynicism of news directors and journalists which is at fault. Nothing — nothing! — is preventing them from devoting more air time to other missing children. At best, they could argue that their ratings would go down… I’m not sure how they know this, since they never do it. And if they risk their ratings… well, they never let that stand in the way of taking the “high road” when the high road means finding ways to destroy political enemies. It is a value choice on their part. *Their* part, not the public’s.

Louis

Would you have preferred to hear it on Stern? He’s a bit more on the (*ss of the) media than On the Media.

http://rocketsocks.blogspot.com/ Robin Goodfellow

I agree, the satire is offensive. Nevertheless, it is substantially less offensive than the racist predilections of the MSM that it is satirizing.

Rick Stilson

I think the key point here is that tv news should stop reporting on missing persons cases. It is not ‘news’ that someone is missing somewhere at all times. Should we be surprised that victim’s loved ones are overwrought emotionally? Likewise, I think they should lay off the coverage of celebrity trials.
I know there is a market for these stories, but there is a market for real news as well. They should really spin off a new network that focuses on tabloid stories, and leave tabloid crap off of the news channel.

http://victorysoap.us/ Andrea Harris

Satire will Save the Children™!
Seriously, while the satirists have a point, I’m really not sure that the answer to “kids of color=expendable” is “pretty white women=expendable.” In any case, I still have one of those old-fashioned tvs where you can control the channel and even turn it off, and I never watch CNNMSNBCFOXetc., so I am less outraged by the assault upon my eyeballs of the Same Three Stories every five g-d minutes.

Joe

Here’s the problem. What happens when you put all the tabloid (i.e. Michael Jackson and missing white girls) fodder on another station?
As CNN is finding with their new Only Hit Show This Season, Nancy Grace, the viewers will just all go to the Tabloid station.
The Lehrer Newshour on PBS (An incredible program) devoted maybe… 10 minutes, in a year and a half, to the OJ Simpson trial. They said “The OJ simpson trial began today, and when there’s a verdict we’ll let you know”, and “The OJ Simpson trial ended today with a not guilty verdict.”
That was it. And guess how the ratings for PBS are compared to CNNFOXMSNBC?
In America (and probably other places too), hard news is essentially a niche market.
People don’t give a fuck. That’s the hard reality we’re dodging here. They really do not care what happens in Darfur, China, or elsewhere. It saddens me, but it’s reality.

http://sloppydawg.blogspot.com Sloppydawg

It is, in fact, the cynicism of news directors and journalists which is at fault. Nothing — nothing! — is preventing them from devoting more air time to other missing children.
There is something preventing these news directors from devoting more air time to other missing children: Ratings.
We’re constantly reading about the impending death of TV news and newspapers, so it only makes sense that these news outlets are looking closely at their newsstand sales, overnight ratings books and their focus groups, to see what piques the interest of Mr. and Ms. John Q. Public and putting it on the air or on a page. That is, when those things don’t interfere with Corporate.